Warning: This week’s column is going to get ugly, and fast. We start with Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, which is also a love letter to its star Sam Rockwell—one written in shit and cum (I told you). First-time writer and director Clark Gregg, an actor (recently in Iron Man and weekly on The New Adventures of Old Christine) is not the first to swoon for Rockwell, the character actor extraordinaire who makes uneven pictures worth the effort: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Assassination of Jesse James (I doubt the rest of the title ever fit on a marquee) all benefit from his special madness. The general audience doesn’t get it: Outside of earlier, scene-stealing assignments in more successful Hollywood pictures like Galaxy Quest and The Green Mile, Rockwell is pretty much a flop indicator, a good actor whose presence virtually guarantees a kind word from critics, a look-see from his more dedicated fans, and a voyage to the bottom of the weekly grosses list, where he and Nicole Kidman often wave at each other.

Escape is possible—Robert Downey, Jr. may have come up for air for good—but Choke is unlikely to be it for Rockwell. And it’s partly his fault. The film is all Rockwell, all the time, and it gets tedious, like an iPod with only a few tunes to shuffle. I haven’t read the book, but the movie goes to black comedy extremes…not too extreme enough, though. A movie like Choke has to hit like a punch in the gut to make an impression, and this one pulls its punches. The shit and cum are implied. I never got the feeling that the R-rating was tested, or threatened, as it might have been in more transgressive hands. (more…)

Outside of a few odds and ends, the summer movie season pretty much concludes today. Throw the tarp over the pool, recondition the leaf blower, it’s done. If you’re willing to lay down cash for Death Race or Babylon A.D., you are in the grips of a cinephilia that in all likelihood requires treatment, and Godspeed to you. I sympathize: if I can beat it you can beat it, and maybe Joan Allen can join our support group, too. (Death Race, Joan? For the sake of our relationship I will believe that you mistook director Paul W.S. “Alien vs. Predator” Anderson for Paul Thomas “There Will Be Blood” Anderson and couldn’t wiggle free from your contract.)

The first of your 12 steps will be laying off the C-level action stuff in the run up to Labor Day—instead, take one Elegy and call me in the morning.

Elegy opened last week in New York and Los Angeles and is fanning across the art-house circuit. It’s based on a novella by Philip Roth, which I have not read. Back in time I read every book due for prestige moviemaking, and saw more than a few whose pages came unglued in the translation, like Angela’s Ashes (1999), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and the last crack at Roth, the Nicholas Meyer-penned The Human Stain (2003). That Meyer, best known for adding to the mythos of Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, also wrote Elegy raised a red flag. But my fears were allayed. Elegy is one of the best films of the summer, and very possibly of the year.

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If I ever run for office, and someone asks the drug-use question, I can honestly say I didn’t inhale. While pop-music critics are a Dionysian lot, snorting coke off groupies’ breasts, film critics are prim, fussbudget types. There were a lot of people laughing at the stoner humor in Pineapple Express. Me, I rolled my own. My bliss started with the opening credits: The film is a Columbia release, and to get the ’70s vibe under way, the opening credits are in the same exact font the studio used for its comedies in the shag-carpet days. “Man, this is gonna be some good shit,” I thought.

And I was right. There is some good shit in Pineapple Express. But there’s some bad shit too. Plus some bat shit toward the end, though the best shit comes after the bad shit, when three of its characters are just sort of chewing the fat the morning after some heavy shit has gone down.

The film comes to us from producer Judd Apatow, whose modest mom-and-pop comedy outfit became a factory after last summer’s Knocked Up and Superbad, both of which were $100 million hits, now churning out new yuks every quarter. Pineapple Express’s star, Seth Rogen, cowrote the script, which I suspect was merely a list of suggestions as he and James Franco, tending to his long-dormant funny bone, headed to the set and started making shit up. The best scenes in the movie, which pit Rogen’s maturity-challenged process server and Franco’s puppyish pot dealer against a bunch of heavies looking for some really great shit cultivated by the government, have the smell of improvisation to them.

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Maybe I’ve been overthinking things. Worrying too much about the corrosive effects of superheroes on the cinema and all that. I did 1,500 words on The Dark Knight last week, and I’m sticking to every annoyed one of them. I will add that a friend asked why I didn’t go under the surface and explore the “politics” of the film, and I said it was because they were right there in plain view, 9/11-Iraq window-dressing to make the story “relevant.” But that’s enough on last week’s sensation for now.

Why so serious? It may be the humidity, or the lack of a proper summer vacation. So I’m clearing my mind. Getting a few matters off my cursor. I’m taking you to the movies, then dropping you off, with a few bucks for popcorn and some parting wisdom. If you’re multiplex-bound, consider the generally excellent Wall-E, which, along with Hellboy II, could use a little more love. If indie/arthouse is how you roll, take these capsules, and call me in early August, when we’ll meet again.

Baghead. Day for Night meets The Blair Witch Project, as discontented “mumblecore” filmmakers tired of failure get more than they bargained when they hole up at a summer cabin in the offseason to improvise a horror movie based on one of their deepest fears — a stranger with a bag on his (or her) head, ready for the kill. The notion is more than paper or plastic as a “Baghead” emerges from the woods to stalk the four friends, two of whom are in a collapsible relationship, and the other pair on the verge of hooking up. The whole mumblecore movement may be a generational thing — no-budget productions where amateurish performers stare out of dirty window shades for minutes at a time aren’t my bag. (more…)

Watching a superdeluxe presentation of The Dark Knight unfold across the eight-story-tall IMAX theater in Manhattan, I had a nagging question: why was the mayor of Gotham City wearing eyeliner and mascara? The movie has anvil-sized matters on its mind, like duality, and good and evil, and guilt and expiation — enough weighty themes to overstuff a Dostoevsky novel. But I latched onto that one stupid detail, a clear Bat-signal that the Caped Crusader had returned but wasn’t doing that much for me.

The next morning I had my answer: the actor is Nestor Carbonell, who apparently looks much the same on Lost. I’m sure that’s a fine islander look (I wouldn’t know, as I don’t watch the show), but it was curious for a stuffed shirt in an urban jungle. It kept throwing me out of the bigger picture that cowriter and director Christopher Nolan had made to follow up Batman Begins, the one that fanboys have been salivating over since 2005. Maybe it was the fault of the towering IMAX process, which enhances what works in a film — here, a semi-superfluous trip to Hong Kong distinguished by death-defying visuals when Batman takes flight in its glass-and-steel canyons, and a truck flip that lands in your lap — but amplifies what doesn’t, like an offbeat makeup job. You might not even notice it at your garden-variety multiplex, which is where I had planned to see The Dark Knight an additional one or two more times. Once may be enough, though. With apologies to those with tickets in hand for the weekend, and those so engorged on the hype that dissenters must be rooted out and punished by the time the weekend tally rolls in, I can no longer beat about the Bat-bush, and must announce that The Dark Knight is the most disappointing movie of the year.

It was not supposed to be this way, and I’m as crushed to report this as you may be to read it. Nolan, the creator of the mind-bending Memento (2000), rescued Batman from the ash heap of the Joel Schumacher era (1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman & Robin), which made the Adam West TV series look like Strindberg by comparison, and Batman Begins is one of the more confident “origins” stories, a slate wiped clean for renewal. True, it is fairly ponderous, and heavy with portent; the Gothic fun of Tim Burton’s contributions (1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns) was missed, and I’ll say up front that I prefer Burton’s fantastic touch. (Sit me down in front of Batman Returns and I won’t budge for two hours.) By bringing the Joker back onto the scene, The Dark Knight promised to shake off some of the gloom and get its freak on. But it has a serious case of the glums and progresses at a lurching, dawdling pace — it’s the Atonement of superhero sagas.

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Like the humans who misjudge or underestimate the big red lug on the big screen, I must apologize to Hellboy. Our first encounter, in 2004, was not a happy one. His debut film lurched about in fits and starts, and was compromised by obvious concessions to make him accessible to audiences, as he had tried to win over his peers by filing his satanic horns down to stumps. It didn’t work, and I yawned over the prospect of the sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

But what a difference four years makes. It’s true that comic book follow-ups, like Spider-Man 2 and Batman Returns, do tend to improve upon the originals: the cumbersome, usually overly reverent and fanboy-ish “origins” are dispensed with, and a more definite tone is established by a returning director who has played a winning hand and is all the more confident the second time out. This is true of the second Hellboy, which for me was the first to show something of the character’s uniqueness. But there is a greater alchemy at work here. With Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro emerged as a true master of the macabre; that deftness, present but only fitfully visible on Hollywood assignments like Mimic and Blade II, has a transformative effect on this sequel. A movie I thought I’d catch on cable turns out to be one of the best and more satisfying films I’ve seen all year. I’m not worthy, Hellboy.

Given a freer hand, del Toro has made sensible choices. Extraneous human characters are gone or whittled down to size. There is a suggestion that the fantastical ones we spend more time with and come to care more about will free themselves from a plot crutch if the movie gods and demons favor us with a third installment. True, there are some things not even great talent can do. The structure of summer action movies is set in stone, with a whomping event imposed every 20 minutes to so to keep the allegedly impatient audience on its toes. But del Toro has the facility to up the ante, with astonishingly rich and engaged visuals that bear repeat viewings. Where Stephen Scott’s terrific production design, and the masterly art and set decoration, end and the CGI begins I could not tell, so seamless is the work, and the makeup and digital effects are equally fluid. More importantly, the writing, while it has its iffy patches on the comic side, is stronger in emotion, giving the inhuman and grotesque heart.

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Sex. You know you want it — and I know you’re not getting it from the movies. And I know you’re not because I’ve been looking myself, and coming up empty. Wanted teases with a proudly bare-bottomed shot of a tattooed Angelina Jolie (a digital effect made flesh) and she treats costar James McAvoy to a big lip-lock — but it’s all a part of his score-settling, and he’s more in love with his guns and knives than a deep-woods survivalist. A movie called Sex and the City might have offered more of the former than the latter. Here again, though, the heaviest lust is expressed for a genuine Vuitton bag, and female orgasm achieved over that scarcest of Manhattan commodities — closet space. (Then again, the men on the show, retained for the movie, are pretty unappealing. I’d want a bag, too, to place over their heads during the brief bump-and-grind scenes.)MTV killed sex in the movies. Videos spawned from edgy fashion photography sexualized the culture, but deprived it of genuine eroticism. The video-fueled Flashdance, a quarter-century ago, has a canned sexiness to it; it’s all about display, and peek-a-boo near-nudity, and a heavy-breathing “empowerment,” not human interaction. When it took off at the box office you could hear the studios breathe a collective sigh of relief; the freedoms let loose in the pesky Seventies were being chased back into the bottle. Audiences would settle for this. Aestheticized non-sex, robotic and passionless, became the norm.

In a sense, I was relieved. I will always remember squirming through Dressed to Kill with my mother and my aunt, thinking it would be a “regular” horror picture. We all loved it, but there are certain things, like, you know, Angie Dickinson self-helping herself in the shower in the very first scene, that you shouldn’t have to watch with Mom. (“A mother who takes her son to see Dressed to Kill; that’s the kind of mom I like,” said Brian De Palma when I relayed this anecdote years later.) (more…)

I have violated the covenant between reader and critic. You, the reader, expect me, the critic, to leave his home in Brooklyn, get on the subway, and attend screenings 25 or so minutes away in Manhattan. This I understand. And I do it without complaint. Without public complaint, that is. I mean, I could complain. About the disruption to my other daily tasks: tending the cat litter, say, or rearranging my Netflix queue. (Only two weeks till the unrated version of The Ruins hits the streets. Awesome!) The crowded trains, which have me longing to purchase the biggest, baddest SUV I can find and expand my carbon footprint to Godzilla size. The frisking I endure at “all-media” screenings, where full body cavity searches conducted by ex-cons with “Mother” tattooed on their biceps are the norm lest we in the media sneak in video cameras to record Prince Caspian for Estonian bootleggers. The deprivation at smaller-group indie screenings, where food and drink are strictly prohibited, and a little man taps me on the shoulder when I reach past my concealed video camera for my concealed Poland Spring and says “No water” as I slowly die of thirst between subtitles.

But that is only part of our unspoken agreement. The other part is getting to the point when I tap out my usually sort-of weekly report card. This time, I am duty-bound to say that I wrote part of this piece while actually watching the movies—not on one of those horrid blue-glow devices that pop on and off and make it look like a search party is intermittently erupting in the theater but on my MacBook, which I took with me to bed as I curled up with my beloved Vera Farmiga in Quid Pro Quo and Matthew Broderick in Finding Amanda, which has just opened for real. And for this I can thank my new best friend, Mark Cuban. (more…)

By the calendar it’s not quite summer yet, but the northeast has already wilted under August heat — and the movies already feel spent and depleted, in need of a second wind. The Pixar movie, WALL-E, might do it: a film without dialogue seems like a mighty good idea given the screenwriting of late. But this week’s comedies — I had held out hope for Get Smart, but based on word-of-shoe-phone will likely get it on Netflix or HBO next summer — feel like filler. I’m lukewarm on Will Smith’s latest Fourth of July picture (I’m lukewarm on Will Smith, period). There are indies to be considered, but by and large, I can Rip Van Winkle the hoped-for Hollywood hits till mid-July, when The Dark Knight and, yes, Mamma Mia! open. I have a growing curiosity about Hellboy II, but it’s hard to see a cult-ish sequel getting much traction.

Still, I’m not entirely disenchanted, though you might think me so given last week’s no-show. I went to the press screening of The Incredible Hulk, like a good little critic, and banged out a few paragraphs on it, admittedly a bit late. But WordPress ate my homework, which I didn’t realize till yesterday. Now, I could push the “delete” key, and be done with yesterday’s hit, which you can already scrape mold from. But, no — I made the effort, dammit, so having raged at the machine here it is, slightly freshened as we head to this week’s haul.

The dumb-ass Hulk movie some of you have been waiting for has arrived. Hear me out: While Ang Lee’s much-mocked V.1 of 2003 makes a mountain out of a molehill, digging deep into a simple Marvel concept, it has an abundance of style, and maybe too much of everything, really. There’s a crazily Freudian father-son dynamic, Pop Art editing matched to comic book frames, and loony flights of fancy (the untamable Hulk leaping over mountains) that only a top-flight filmmaker would dare to risk. By contrast, there’s nothing particularly at stake in the new do-over, The Incredible Hulk. It’s an unleavened summer blockbuster, an entertainment machine that blows things up, sputters, grinds, and stops after two hours, then resumes to pick up new passengers at the multiplex.

Hulk left me feeling overstuffed, but I knew I had seen something that departed from the comic book adaptation template. The Incredible Hulk clings to it for dear life, too timid to do anything out of the ordinary and jeopardize the gross and the franchise possibilities. (more…)

You can see the nominees for best foreign-language film at the Oscars coming from a kilometer away. They’re tied to some sort of hot-button issue, or a pivotal historical event in the 20th century (see this year’s winner, The Counterfeiters), or a polyglot of arty and hearty elements that are delivered to us in subtitles. They are also often not the best movies their countries have to offer. Mongol, the 2007 nominee from Kazakhstan (choke on it, Borat), departs from the template. It begins with an ancient Mongolian proverb that might have sustained Conan the Barbarian through his various trials — “Do not scorn the weak cub; he may become the brutal tiger” — and with plates of 12th-century mutton and meat dishes thrust into our faces. Ladies and gentlemen, loosen the ascots you wear when you enter the arthouse for the usual highfalutin fare: There will be blood.

This is the story of Genghis Khan. Or, rather, one-third of it: the Russian director, Sergei Bodrov (of the 1996 Oscar nominee Prisoner of the Mountains, a Tolstoy update) has announced two more parts. Temudgin, the boy who would be Khan, has not been well-served by Hollywood. On Turner Classic Movies recently I came across the 1965 feature Genghis Khan, with all-purpose ethnic Omar Sharif grappling with a usurping Stephen Boyd and the none-too-Chinese James Mason and Robert Morley in yellow face and false eyelashes as onlookers to their quarrel. It was about as good as a Genghis Khan picture from the director of Where the Boys Are and Come Fly with Me could be. It was, however, still better than the legendary-for-the-wrong-reasons The Conqueror (1956), which I read about in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time in 1978 and lived down to its reputation when I saw it 20 years later. Here, red-haired Susan Hayward plays Borte, Genghis Khan’s hot-tempered lady love, and as Temudgin — a scowling John Wayne. “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her,” the Duke drawls. “There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar woman.” If the subject had been alive during the making of this picture the rebuilding of Hollywood after the wrath of Khan would still be going on. [As it was, it was the cast and crew who suffered from the irradiated soil of the Utah locations, with many, including the two leads, dying in a vicious cancer cluster over the next two decades.]

Mongol has the smell of authenticity. [Dudes, I haven’t forgotten Genghis Khan’s gnarly appearance in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but we shall pass over that in silence.] (more…)